Nineteenth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

The crisis of the humanities in higher education is a well-known fact: due to high growth in STEM fields and corporate-backed administrators’ emphases on education as job training, humanities departments are losing students at steady rates. At the same time, the growing gig economy and diversifying student demographics are challenging all university departments to revise their course offerings and stay relevant. However, university bureaucracies and the tenure system are designed to resist change, at least at the speed with which our world is changing. The student body has shifted over the last decade from mostly white-collar whites to mostly blue-collar blacks, and my mostly white English department is struggling to reverse a gradual but constant loss of majors. My paper will evaluate the department’s efforts thus far and explore new approaches.